The Hand of Peril/Part 3/Chapter 2
II
Kestner, no longer wearing his pink cock's comb and his arm-sling, stared over the ship's rail as his liner, having slipped through Quarantine a few minutes before sunset, crept from the Upper Bay into the narrower reaches of the North River. He stared disconsolately at the city of his birth, depressed by that thin misery which so often returns to the traveller who remembers that he has become a man without a country.
"So that's New York!" sighed Wilsnach, close beside him at the ship's rail.
Kestner continued to look at the precipitous skyline of the city shouldering up into the misty evening light, the incomparable outline of man's effort and aspiration. Yet he looked at it only as a hunter stares into an unbroken woodland.
Somewhere in that undecipherable warren of steel and stone lurked the fugitives whom it was his duty to find. Somewhere amid that tangle and welter of life, he remembered, were Lambert and Lambert's daughter. And the whole aim and object of Kestner's existence, once that liner had docked, was to seek out this perilous pair and protect that undreaming city from their attacks.
"And we've lost a week!" persisted the still melancholy-minded Wilsnach, whose thoughts had obviously followed the same line as Kestner's.
The other man took out a cigar and smiled.
"But we've got a whole skin on our bodies again," he cheerily corrected. "And the subtler satisfaction of knowing that our sagest deductions have practically been verified!"
As he smoked at the ship's rail, lazily watching the broken skyline in front of him, already stippled like a snake's back with its innumerable lights, the Pannnonia's wireless operator hurried to his side.
This alert-minded youth and Kestner had already transacted much confidential business together, so no word was spoken as he thrust the loose sheets into the Secret Agent's hand.
Then the operator stood at the other man's side, staring for a moment at the unparalleled panorama of the evening city.
"When did these come?" asked Kestner as he casually unfolded the slightly crumpled sheets. He did so without haste and with no anxiety as to the message which they might carry.
Yet he saw, to his surprise, that they were in the secret code of the Department. It took him several moments to translate the first message into intelligibility. Then he stood with an odd catch of the breath, staring down at the fluttering yellow sheet.
For the message read:
"Local agents are completing Lambert case. Don't complicate, but catch Mauretania with Wilsnach to-night for Fishguard and report promptly at Paris Office for instruction on Stillwell pearl smuggling case."
The message bore the signature of the Service head himself. It left Kestner inwardly disturbed. Yet, stirred as he was, he betrayed no emotion as he pondered the second enigmatic row of words. This second message was equally explicit. He noticed, even before fully deciphering its meaning, that it was signed by the Secretary of the Department himself. Then he went back and translated the code.
"Department taken over Lambert case and round up of trio assured. Act promptly on Byrne's wired instructions and consult mail already despatched Paris Office."
Kestner stared down at the message for several seconds. His first vague feeling of frustration had already given way to a quick sense of revolt, of indignation at official tyranny. He felt like a player ordered off the field at the first innings—and ordered off because of his own unforgiveable error. He was alive to the reproof in those two messages. He saw that he had been superseded. He had crossed the Atlantic on a wild goose chase. He had travelled five thousand miles only to be sent back by a few curt words flashed over a wire and tossed across the Bay to his incoming steamer.
It was the end of the game. Maura Lambert and her activities were no longer a thing of moment to him. She and her fellow conspirators had passed on to other hands. The most alluring case on which he had ever worked had been snatched from him. And the most alluring woman he had ever had occasion to shadow had suddenly been carried out of his world. And this meant that she too had come to the end of her game. He had hoped to figure in that end. But it had been ordered otherwise.
Kestner handed the fluttering sheets over to the patiently-waiting Wilsnach.
"We're out of it," he announced, though it took an effort to speak as lightly as he wished.
"Out of what?" asked Wilsnach.
"Read them!" was all Kestner said.
Wilsnach frowned over the two despatches for several seconds. Then he too looked disconsolately up, and stared at the broken skyline of the evening city and the crowded waterways and the ever shuttling ferries and harbour-tugs.
"Why, this means we've got to get aboard the Mauretania to-night!" Kestner heard his companion exclaim. "This is Wednesday, and she'll sail an hour after midnight. We can't even get to a hotel."
Kestner quietly lighted a cigar and leaned on the ship's rail.
"It's all in the game!" he said as he folded up the messages.
"But what are we to do?" asked Wilsnach.
"The only thing there is to do," was Kestner's answer. "First make sure of a stateroom on that steamer and then buy some clothes. Of course we might do the Avenue and the Drive in a taxi, with dinner at Delmonico's, say, for the sake of old times."
"It'll seem like a funeral!" scoffed Wilsnach.
"Well, it is one!" acknowledged Kestner.